Ninety-seven percent of scientists have now put that to rest. They’ve acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.” — President Obama

Add your name to stand with President Obama (and experts like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson) for an energy policy that helps fight climate change.

–Dana

UPDATE: Doubters and deniers are going to continue to pay a price for their blasphemy – even if a credentialed liberal. These fervent fundamentalists will continue to push their religion on everyone. Even our president is an evangelist, opting to focus on climate change for his UCI commencement speech.

Climate McCarthyism has claimed another victim. Dr Caleb Rossiter – an adjunct professor at American University, Washington DC – has been fired by a progressive think tank after publicly expressing doubt about man-made global warming.

Rossiter, a former Democratic congressional candidate, has impeccably liberal credentials. As the founder of Demilitarization for Democracy he has campaigned against US backed wars in Central America and Southern Africa, against US military support for dictators and against anti-personnel landmines. But none of this was enough to spare him the wrath of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) when he wrote an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal describing man-made global warming as an “unproved science.”

Two days later, he was sacked by email. The IPS said: “We would like to inform you that we are terminating your position as an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies…Unfortunately, we now feel that your views on key issues, including climate science, climate justice, and many aspects of US policy to Africa, diverge so significantly from ours.”

“They’ve acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.”

Nothing there about it being an emergency. The planet has been warming (although this may have tapered off). Humans may well have something to do with it, but how much is in wild dispute.

So, if you don’t agree that we need to kill a billion third world people by taking away their food and energy — to save our sorry asses — then you’re a monster? That the part I’ve never been able to follow.

It’s really, really happenin’! Onethousandonehundredeleventyone!11!1! The Earth’s climate and topography are dynamic. Try as you might, Gaia’s going to do as she pleases. Plate tectonics creates mountains, and grinds them to dust. It’s been happening for the ~4 billion years the planets been around. And that big ball of gas in the sky has a great effect as well. Hey, let’s seed the clouds!

scrubone #5 – an excellent presentation – with results that can be and have been replicated … which means that the Cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming – now rebranded as the Cult of Climate Change – soon to be the Cult of Climate Disruption folks cannot allow such science to be taught … it must be suppressed !

I understand Lois Lerner had an email that proved conclusively and with truly NO room for any doubt that anthropogenic global warming is not only a fact, but is more dangerous than has previously been described. However, the email also had a cheap and virtually painless solution to all the problems, which included a workable method for cold fusion.

If an increase in costs due to idiotic anti-AGW environmentalism can be somehow made a financial burden exclusive to liberals/registered Democrats, I’m all for it! Either that or if all people of the left, as an auxiliary to anti-AGW legislation, stop exhaling CO2 for at least, say, 1 hour, I’m all for that too.

#20, Dana: Sacking one liberal professor is a good start. Who cares why. Indeed, who on the left cares enough to even consider reality, physics, logic, simple math, etc. It’s all about how you feel, and whether that will advance the cause.

In the liberal religion of global warming, Gaia is only a holy relic. Big Government is the god.

And Bill Nye the Science Guy is an expert.

Meanwhile Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, is a knuckle dragging science denier. He once compared global warming hysterics to children hiding in a dark closet scaring each other.

Here’s a presentation he made recently at the Europäisches Institut für Klima und Energie (now really, do I need to translate that?). I guess Bill Nye the Science Guy was unavailable.

Oh, no, wait. Bill Nye the Science Guy couldn’t have given this presentation because it was about how “climate change” is religion, not science. Its title in English is “Global Warming, Climate Models, and Speech – A Critical Look.” Dr. Lindzen initiated his discussion of the current state of what passes for climate “science” with this quote from Orwell:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, the fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts.

Hilarity ensues. A few choice quotes:

Global warming I think fits this in many respects. It clearly and has been since the beginning about politics and power rather than science…

In science there is the attempt to clarify; in glabal warming language is used to confuse and mislead the public.

The misuse of language extends to the use of models..

In a further abuse of language, the advocates attempt to rephrase issues as yes-no issues…

These yes-no questions are meaningless; crucial to the scientific method are how much questions. This is certainly the case for the above questions, where, even most skeptics (including me) would answere yes…

We are speaking different languages.

That said, it should be recognized that the basis for a climate that is highly sensitive to added greenhouse gases is solely the computer models. The relation of this sensitivity to catastrophe, moreover, does not even emerge from the models, but rather from the fervid imagination of climate activists.

No wonder the liberal arts and gender/ethnic studies majors in the Obama freshman dorm administration would rather discuss groupthink consensus. Nonsense that is the antithesis of science but something that future community activists, women’s center social workers, and Starbucks cashiers can grasp.

I saw a recent post at PowerLine that had a presentation by Lindzen that they thought was somewhat accessible, at least important parts of it; I haven’t taken the time to watch it yet, and I don’t know if it is the same one linked above. (And I can’t link it from this machine, not enough RAM to handle the too plentiful video banner ads there.)

But Lindzen and Curry and a third non-conformist were appointed to the American Physical Society panel a few months ago to reexamine the official position, giving hope that maybe some sanity will pop it’s inconvenient head up. Interesting that the Dems are doubling down when there appears to be a crack appearing in the scientific “consensus”.

It’s really pretty obvious. Photos emerge from Abu Ghraib showing some silly stuff, and the NYT can’t find enough front page acreage to display it. Why? Because Bush is President, and they think they can get the electorate to despise Bush. Ditches full of Iraqi militia who surrendered and were subsequently machine gunned can be found on the web, but the NYT is oblivious. Why? Because it doesn’t help advance the cause.

So one liberal Prof fired for making a rational argument contrary to the party line is one in the plus column. They will never be fired otherwise. Perhaps when the terms of their employment become a little more obvious to the drones presently manning the lecture halls in academia, some of these useful fools (with the necessary talent and a smidge of honor) will decide to find an honest living. This will make the incompetence of the remainder even more evident to their students. Dogma is very hard to disquise, and nothing will do more to convince the upcoming generation of the folly of liberalism than a cirriculum loaded with gender studies, climate and social justice. Especially when all the male students are forced to genuflect before every class and apologize for their existence.

Temperatures are directly related to the logarithm of the carbon dioxide concentration tyo he basethe base 2. Using simple mathematics, it is easy to calculate the anthropogenic carbon dioxide contribution to temperature changes. One inescapable conclusion is that the marginal effectiveness of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas decreases with higher concentrations of carbon dioxide, meaning that the climate is more sensitive to anthropogenic carbon dioxide at low carbon dioxide conc concentrations than high carbon dioxide concentrations.

there can not be a tipping point, at least to warming due to carbon dioxide concentration.

“Ich bin ein Denier!”
I deny that Anthropomorphic Global Warming has any significant impact on climate.
I deny that Global Climate Change is having a net negative impact on life on Earth.
I deny that Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is a pollutant.
I deny that alternative energy sources have Socialist solutions.
I deny that any Science is Settled.
I deny that those funded by Politicians seek Scientific truth.

Could you please repeat that in simpler language so that I can discern the point you are making? As I read it now, I think it’s saying that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide have less effect on the weather than lower concentrations. Given that mankind (am I going to get in trouble for using that word?) is responsible for less than a 1,000th of a percent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere how can mankind make a difference in the weather?

there can not be a tipping point, at least to warming due to carbon dioxide concentration.

There also cannot be a tipping point because of chaos theory, but only a higher probability of tipping over, and there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that if there is a tipping point or tipping range, we are anywhere near it – we are either over it, or not yet there.

Not to mention that all the proposals would only marginally affect the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – even if all the other nations went along.

And that’s only the beginning of the absurdities and the innumeracy here.

Of course the Party is right because the Party is always right. If the Party says man-caused climate change exists, man-caused climate change exists. The deviationist lackeys of the entrenched interests and the agents of the foreign hegemonists who subvert the Party’s authority must be dealt with.

Thanks, Steve57.
When I get a chance to view it I will return to the topic. maybe a few non-MIT heads put together can help the guy translate it into something that can make a point for larger society…

Meanwhile, it looks like we finally captured a Benghazi “ringleader”, who happens to claim it was the video after all…
I wonder how much money or influence is being paid in exchange for this, to who, from whom

The law of diminishing returns, and the possibility that the effect of adding any more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at some level eventually becomes zero.

It approaches zero, but never reaches zero.

If I could post subscripts and superscripts into the comments, I could illustrate the exact equation for how much a marginal increase or decrease of carbon dioxide influences temperature. In a nutshell, the marginal effectiveness of carbon dioxide at 300 ppm is about 33.44% (a little over a third) that of the marginal effectiveness of carbon dioxide at 100 ppm.

Michael, where are you getting those figures? No one knows with mathematical certainty how sensitive the atmosphere is to added CO2. The global warming alarmists claim to know, and that the atmosphere is hypersensitive to added greenhouse gases, but the only basis for that belief is their models.

In reality CO2 was between 355ppm-360ppm in 1995. According to NOAA this past April CO2 averaged over 400ppm “for the first time in human history.” Horrors.

Yet despite the steady 10% rise in atmospheric CO2 between then and now, there has been no global warming since 1996.

The atmosphere doesn’t appear to be sensitive to added trace greenhouse gases like CO2.

The end of April has arrived, and with it, the record for the first month in human history with an average carbon dioxide level in Earth’s atmosphere above 400 parts per million has been set.

With a little more than 24 hours left in the month, the average for April can’t slip below 400 ppm. “Every day in April has been over 400 ppm,” said Pieter Tans, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

According to the RSS satellite data, whose value for May 2014 has just been published, the global warming trend in the 17 years 9 [months] since September 1996 is zero (Fig. 1). The 213 months without global warming represent more than half the 425-month satellite data record since January 1979. No one now in high school has lived through global warming.

In reality CO2 was between 355ppm-360ppm in 1995. According to NOAA this past April CO2 averaged over 400ppm “for the first time in human history.” Horrors.

Yet despite the steady 10% rise in atmospheric CO2 between then and now, there has been no global warming since 1996.

No one has claimed that carbon dioxide is the sole determinant of atmospheric temperature. Obviously, other factors were enough to cancel out the 0.26 degree contribution that would be caused by the increase in carbon dioxide concentration (calculated from the radiative forcing equation).

(also, the effectiveness of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas was reduced by 11.24% since 1995.)

But they could say we’re still at a high plateau. Except they don’t, because that would mean there’s no emergency and we don’t need to take drastic measures (that even by their calculations would be futile and ineffective. To be effective, they say, we’d need to keep 2/3 of all proven oil reserves in the ground. And proven oil reserves is much less than what you can expect to get.)

You know, when they publicize global warming they now say one of three things:

1) There has been global warming over the past 100 or 150 years (they never use a short time frame, because shorter time frames don’t work.)

2) They predict temperatures will shoot up.

3) They say the highest years on record since the late 1800s were in the last fifteen years or so.

Everything is consistent with there being more than one posisble cause of climate change. In fact, the data arer not consistent with there being one factor, even if you suppose there are some other un-meassured man-made factors besides carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

To go from “anthropomorphic global warming” to “carbon dioxide” is already bait and switch. They say “anthropomorphic global warming” because they say sunspots can’t be the entire cause.

Even worse for the theory of catastrophic, anthropogenic (human caused), global warming is that during this now extended period of no global warming mankind’s emissions of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that are supposed to be predominant in causing global warming continued to explode, with one third of all CO2 added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution occurring during this period.

The Economist magazine shocked the global warming establishment with an article in March, 2013 that began with this lede:

Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.

That one quarter is actually now one third since the industrial revolution, which is now increasingly at stake in this debate…

Moreover, the now extended trend of no global warming is not turning around any time soon. That increasingly established trend is being produced by long term natural causes. Even rank amateurs among the general public can see that the sun is the dominant influence on the Earth’s temperatures. Even the most politicized scientists know that they cannot deny that solar activity such as sun spot cycles, and variations in solar magnetic fields or in the flux of cosmic rays, have contributed to major climate changes of the past, such as the Little Ice Age, particularly pronounced from roughly 1650 AD to 1850 AD, the Medieval Warm Period from about 950 AD to 1250 AD, during which global temperatures were higher than today, and the early 20th century Warming Period from 1910 to 1940 AD.

That solar activity, particularly sunspot cycles, is starting to mimic the same patterns that were seen during the Little Ice Age, as I discussed in a previous column. As a result, outside politically correct Western circles, where science today has been Lysenkoized on this issue, there is a burgeoning debate about how long of a cooling trend will result.

Now I can think of another factor – burning coal, whch adds both CO2 and dust to the atmosphere, with the dust having an immediate pronounced cooling effect, buit lasting only for a few years.

They’d be credible if their computer climate models could take known data from the past 50 years and come up with the present climate measurements—but they can’t. If I hand in my computer project and it doesn’t work, I get an “F”. They get another grant!

If they twiddle with it enough, they can get their climate models to work, but only for the past.

Initially, they wouldn’t release the algorithm they used. When they did any numbers they plugged in produced the “hockey stick” graph. They made assumptions about the variables that can’t be substantiated, i.e., variables need a relation to one another. It’s mathematics. Try changing a mathematical formula and make a change to the ratio of the variables for each calculation and see how it affects the outcome.